12/09/2011 – Quim Tarrida – “If You Blink, You’ll Miss It”

“If You Blink, You’ll Miss It” is Quim Tarrida’s first exhibition in the United States. This project is part of the Subheroes Project, which includes a large part of the artist’s multi-disciplinary production from the past few years. The title is derived from a film industry jargon term, which is used to refer to subliminal images inserted in some sequences, and which are imperceptible to the naked eye.

The exhibition consists of an approach to the personal universe of Quim Tarrida, which he himself calls the Subcutanian World, a microcosm inhabited by strange, metamorphic and viral beings, true anti-heroes on the verge of the uncanny. Projections of the self or of Neo-pop alter egos, ultra-world characters, compose a unique and prodigious imaginary, and attain form through a series of sculptural pieces, limited ceramic editions, and drawings, notable among which are classical pieces from his iconography, such as Subsub Family, The Soldier, Subcutanian Ninja, Oh Gaar, or his latest productions, Relaxing in Blue and the life-size The Monkey Knows.

“If you blink, you miss it” starts Friday, Dec. 9th, 2011 and runs through Dec. 30th.
There will be an opening reception from 7-11 PM on Dec. 9th at Toy Art Gallery’s new showroom located at
7571 Melrose Ave. Hollywood CA 90046.

FEROCIOUS GAMES
Quim Tarrida (Barcelona, 1967) reclaims immaturity as a piece of militant resistance, and childhood mythologies as a battleground. From his own private Subculture Zone, the artist perverts cultural icons, articulates genealogies between myth and play disguised as innocence, and reveals the operation of martial indoctrination under the illusion of the ludic. Far removed from pop irony and sterile cynicism, his discourse searches, among the forms of popular culture, for those nodes of tension which can allow us to challenge a present where the all-powerful violence has hidden behind the mask of kindness, of what is apparently innocuous. In short, of what is seductive.

The toy, the religious idol, or the hero of totalitarian monumentalism melt into the same object in order to question the weak lines of that separate the realm of innocence from that of the successive harnessing of the individual in the adult world. Quim Tarrida’s gaze deciphers the buried blood circuits of violence in an anti-Utopian reality which has sophisticated its mechanisms of control until disguising itself as a fantasy at the service (and measured up to) the user.

A guerrilla art form with a deep knowledge of marketing, Quim Tarrida’s Neo-Pop work combines disparate echoes – all the way from Lewis Carol to Walt Disney, with stops at Jules Verne, 1950’s Science Fiction and the anime aesthetic – in order to elaborate explosive conceptual artifacts. In the hands of the artist, subliminal communication, as used in advertising as a tool to control the consumer, become a weapon for agitation, a key to ignite gazes and to contemplate a landscape in which, finally, the hidden meanings of the universe of objects that surrounds us shine brightly through the flames.

Tarrida has internalized the chinese language of the enemy, and has appropriated the subversive function of humor to begin sketching a Secret Guide of the boundless theme park we inhabit. And, from which, it seems, we can’t easily escape.